Another year of Bumbershoot is off to a rousing start for Prairie and me. Lots of good music and peoplewatching today, and more to come. This rundown will be a bit abbreviated, as I’m pretty tired, but I wanted to get as much as I could out of my head while it was still fresh.
We got to the Seattle Center just a little after noon, right at the beginning of the day, and settled right down at the Bumbrella stage to watch Bakra Batá, a steel drum, percussion, and masquerade ensemble that’s been in Seattle since 1984. I’d actually run across them before, at the Seattle Folklife festival last May, but this was the first time I actually knew who it was I was watching perform. Really excellent stuff — a strong island flavor, of course, but with a fairly wide range of other influences also. Very danceable, and it wasn’t long at all before they had a good portion of the audience up on their feet.
From there, we wandered over to the Backyard stage for the Foghorn Stringband, very old-timey Americana bluegrass. Things like this are a large part of why I enjoy Bumbershoot so much — just a few minutes to walk from Caribbean-style steel drums, past some good blues, and over to traditional bluegrass. We sat back and ate some of the snacks we’d brought along while watching the band, and when I got up to dump our trash into a trashcan, the lead singer decided to inform the crowd that, “nothing goes better with a black Utilikilt than one of our t-shirts!” Apparently I’d gone and gotten myself noticed…
Right near the Backyard stage this year is a rock garden, constructed of rocks painstakingly balanced on top of other rocks. Okay, so that description doesn’t make it sound terribly interesting, but I’d hate to be trying to pull off the balancing acts that the people constructing this thing have managed to do. Far more patience and steady hands than I’ve got, that’s for sure.
With some time to kill before the next act we were planning on checking out, we started wandering the grounds, and ran across some more men in kilts — this time, though, these were men in traditional kilts, playing bagpipe and drums. They got a laugh out of my shirt, and we stood and watched for a while (me for the bagpipes, which I’ve always liked, and Prairie both for the bagpipes and to admire the man playing the bagpipes, who she highly approved of).
Not long after that, we ran across the Vamola drum and dance troupe on one of their many daily parades throughout the grounds. They’re always a lot of fun to watch — pretty girls in skimpy clothing dancing to really good percussion. I’m all for that!
Our next stop was to see none other than Nancy Sinatra. Her show was great. She started off with ‘Bang Bang’, which I’d first heard in Kill Bill, and went through a fair amount of her catalog. She had a cute little segment in the middle where she sang against a backdrop of scenes from the movies she’d starred in back in the 60’s and 70’s, and then eventually finished off her set with — of course — ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’‘, coming down and walking through the audience and greeting as many of her fans as she could.
Once Nancy was done, we spent a little time with AllGoRhythm, an modern Indian group. By this point in the day, though, things were starting to get a bit chillier as the sun went down, so we took a break for a while to make a run home and grab some dinner and another layer of clothing before heading back for the evening.
Once we got back, we didn’t have anything in particular planned out, so we started perusing the evening’s schedule. I noticed Robyn Hitchcock and remembered hearing something from him that I’d enjoyed in the past, so we decided that that was worth a shot. We headed over to the performance hall, and ended up getting in early enough to catch the last half-hour or so of Pedro the Lion‘s set. While I recognized the name, neither Prairie nor I knew anything about Pedro the Lion, but we both ended up enjoying what we heard a lot. Being entirely new to the music, I couldn’t tell you at all what songs we heard, but we’ll both want to look into that a bit more.
A little while after Pedro was done, Robyn took the stage. While his first song — sort of a cover of the Beatles’ ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ — was a little odd, his second song happened to be one that I knew, ‘Balloon Man’, which I have on an old MTV 120 Minutes sampler. The rest of the show was quite enjoyable, including a quite amusing tidbit about how if you’re at a concert while the artist is tuning his instrument, the vibrations from the tuning will settle in your spine, and when you get home and go to bed, as you relax those vibrations are released. Should you have a rodent of any type for a pet (gerbil, mouse, rat, rabbit, etc.), those released vibrations will crank up the libido of said rodent, and you’re virtually gauranteed to end up with little rodent babies before too long (assuming you have two un-neutered rodents of opposing sexes, of course). I’m not sure it made a lot of sense, but it was quite amusing.
And that was that. With Robyn done, we wandered back up the hill, made a quick run to QFC for water and for more batteries for the camera, and then back home…and now that I’ve got this done, it’s time for bed. Much more tomorrow…
Update: All my pictures from today are now up in the family photo gallery. More will be added as the weekend progresses.
“Balloon Man” by Hitchcock, Robyn and the Egyptians from the album Never Mind the Mainstream (1988, 3:34).